Paul Kagame Quotes

You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can't do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself. I don't say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive.

I have a different kind of experience than other girls had. I've had to face a lot of different styles and adjust to them. I had to face a lot of bad situations and come back. I've had to fight with my eyes swollen shut and my nose broken and bloody.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

I had to fight my whole life to break out of my circumstances. That's just part of my makeup.

Either you give in, or you fight. That's all I know, being where I'm from. You fight for what you want. You go after what you want. The only thing I could do was give up or keep fighting for what I wanted in life.

Man. I've been through a lot as a kid. But at the same time that upbringing just made me stronger and made me more determined to make it out of where I made it out from and just fight extra hard to not go back.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

Listen, I come from the most screwed-up dysfunctional situation. You've got violence. Police at your house. Your dad's gone. Nowhere to live. I want people to know, if I can make it, anybody can make it.

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.

Everyone has egos, and you want to come out on top. You have to pick yourself up and go at it again.

I've always believed in survival.

The first few years in L.A. were really tough and scary, but I had to figure things out for myself.

You have to wake up and you have to run if you want to survive.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

I've lived through a lifetime of crises and survived.

No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you.

I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father's fortitude.

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done.

We just kept hanging in and fighting.

I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

Since I was a child, my father was sick. I've always known him to be that way. That's why I'm proud of him - he has a disease he's obviously struggling with, but he's not letting it stop him from doing what he wants to do.

Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.

I know the true meaning of getting by by the skin of my teeth; I do. It doesn't matter whether you've got money or you haven't, whether you're famous or not. This is the case for all women, actually; you have to carry on. You always have to carry on. And you can, because you have to.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.